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Hey folks!

Hope you're having a beautiful week, building amazing things with your favorite library! Last week, the React Native team asked their Twitter followers to share the apps they built. They received hundreds of amazing answers, definitely worth checking out if you want to be impressed by how far people are taking React Native. It's really great to see the RN core team engage with us open source users more, it shows how much Facebook is investing in this project, and makes me believe even more in React Native's future!

In other news, React Native 0.59.0 is coming out within the next week or two. I've already mentioned that Hooks will be included in this version, but this week I also learned that it will ship with a new version of JSC, in order to satisfy Google Play's 64-bit support requirement, which is becoming mandatory in 2019. When this version comes out, it will be important to upgrade your codebases before August 2019, otherwise you will not be able to publish or update your Android apps. On top of that, apps not upgraded before August 2021 will be removed from the Google Play Store. Let your team know, and make this a priority!

Alright then, I wish you all a great end of the week, and a restful weekend!

Hope you enjoy this issue, cheers! 🍻

Kenza Iraki

News

If you're wondering what's been up with the React Native repo lately, the answer is: A LOT. The Lean Core effort is in full swing, and many packages have been moved out of the core repo for easier maintenance. Christoph Nakazawa wrote up an update to keep us all in the loop about that, and let us know of what's coming in React Native 0.59.0!

Libraries & Tools

React Native Tab View has been rewritten from the ground up with react-native-gesture-handler and react-native-reanimated. The component's performance in this version is crazy good 🔥. Unfortunately, the rewrite means it's not backwards compatible, so if you're upgrading from an earlier version, you'll get a lot of breaking changes, but it's totally worth the effort!

HUGE announcement from the Expo team that they've been working on for a while: you can now use Expo APIs, even if you bootstrapped your app with react-native init! Expo has been shipping incredibly useful APIs for React Native, most of them are complex and interact with Native APIs, but until now, you could only use them if you created your app with Expo in the first place. Well, no longer, and this opens up a lot of doors for React Native developers! 🎉

Upgrading versions is notably one of the most painful aspects of React Native. When the RN team asked a couple of months ago what people's pain points were, upgrading was the most commonly voted one. This little tutorial is a useful read if you need to upgrade soon (which you do :p), worth checking out!

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Engineering

If you're coming from a Native development background, you probably felt like a total noob when you got started with React Native. While Android and iOS development have similar paradigm, the React paradigm is a whole new world, which is harder to grasp if you don't have previous web development experience. An engineer at Wix had this exact experience, and wrote this amazing article to help React Native newcomers understand React Native's architecture, and how everything fits together. Must read!

Business

I don't remember the exact statistic, but I remember hearing that the overwhelming majority of startups fail. As someone with the ambition of starting a company one day, it's terrifying to hear! While there are many reasons a startup can fail, from the wrong team, to the wrong product, to the wrong timing, an often overlooked aspect is engineering mistakes. This is a great read if you're working in a startup, or interested in the startup world, because software engineering for a young company is a whole different beast, and it takes time to learn!

Random

Developer Advocates (or Avocados 🥑) are some of the most highly coveted roles in Software. After all, you get to travel all over the world, meet amazing people and speak at conferences, all the time! Nader Dabit is one of the pillars of the React Native community, and also a Developer Advocate at AWS. In this amazing write up, he gives great tips on how to get into this domain, and specifically the skills you need to develop to get noticed by companies. Great read, Nader, as always!